Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, RoundUp

New Tumor Evidence Found in Confidential Glyphosate Data

Major news on the glyphosate front: the first ever independent analysis of the complete confidential data set sent by industry to the EU for the re-licensing of glyphosate shows EFSA and ECHA’s safety assessment would have failed to identify several cases of tumors and cancer following an exposure to the substance. 

May 31, 2017 | Source: Sustainable Pulse | by

Major news on the glyphosate front: the first ever independent analysis of the complete confidential data set sent by industry to the EU for the re-licensing of glyphosate shows EFSA and ECHA’s safety assessment would have failed to identify several cases of tumors and cancer following an exposure to the substance. It is high time the complete data set is published in full to enable scrutiny by the scientific community.

According to Christopher Portier, a leading environmental health and carcinogenicity specialist 1 who has been actively defending the IARC assessment in the glyphosate re-licensing process in the EU, the public agencies who performed the scientific assessment of glyphosate’s toxicity (BfR, EFSA and ECHA) would have failed to identify eight cases of statistically significant increase in tumors following glyphosate exposure in the confidential data set provided by industry.

Dr Portier has sent on May 28 a letter detailing his findings to the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, copying most institutions involved in the EU glyphosate assessment. His work, he writes, shows that “eight instances where significant increases in tumor response following glyphosate exposure were not included in the assessment by either EFSA or EChA. This suggests that the evaluations applied to the glyphosate data are scientifically flawed, and any decisions derived from these evaluations will fail to protect public health.”